Corporate sustainability, or environmental governance by large private sector organizations, requires rethinking how firms operate in response to urgent climate and social challenges, and aligning business strategy with decarbonization, and balancing stakeholder expectations with long-term value creation. The rise in corporate sustainability presents the opportunity for firms to redefine their purpose, serving society rather than markets only. This course trains students to lead in corporate sustainability in terms of both the theory and applied practice, across several key areas: Energy efficiency, carbon target setting, decarbonizing energy consumption, stakeholder engagement and materiality assessment, financing sustainable goals, tracking and disclosing internal climate metrics, and calculating carbon footprint. This includes setting carbon targets using the Science-Based Targets Initiative (SBTI) target setting tool; reading live building energy system analytics and understanding how inefficiencies are detected and remedied in real time; how to navigate different sources and forms of climate finance, including incentives, to defray the cost of achieving sustainability goals and environmental law compliance; using internal stakeholder engagement and materiality assessment from large firms to understand how effective stakeholder engagement and materially relevant impacts by firm operations are assessed; how tracking and disclosure of climate metrics to key repositories such as CDP is conducted to enable climate performance assessment; and how to calculate greenhouse gas emissions equivalences of large corporate activities and events. By integrating theory, data, and hands-on exercises, this course equips students with the skills needed to lead corporate sustainability efforts and meet the growing demand for climate accountability in business.
Benjamin Leffel
- Course Syllabi
- Topics on: Business and Climate Change, Climate Finance, Climate Policy, Climate Sustainability, Corporate Sustainability Strategy, Decarbonization, Energy, Environmental Leadership, ESG, Mitigation, Net Zero, Renewable Energy, Social Impact and Sustainability, Sustainability Reporting and Measurement, Sustainable Cities, Sustainable Finance
